I am extremely worried about the reliability of the computerized voting systems that will be used in the presidential election in November.

There are several things that can go wrong with these systems. Even professional programmers with good intentions can erroneously program them. Professionals, hackers, criminal organizations and others can fraudulently program them. They can malfunction electronically.

In each of these cases, there might presently be no way to ascertain the correct results of the voting.

According to what I have read, the machines have not been carefully audited in all jurisdictions to make sure they will function correctly, and a number of computer experts have testified before Congress and elsewhere that the machines are not secure and cannot be relied upon.

Most private users of computers know that they sometimes fail in spite of our best efforts, that the failures can be due to viruses or “worms” or mistakes in the software or some completely unknown cause.

All of this raises the appalling prospect of a major election going wrong against the will of the people, with no way of checking the results. It is urgent for Congress to enact legislation enabling voters to verify their own machine votes and create records of these votes on paper.

Karl K. Norton

Bangor